I pressed the button.
Nothing.
What was wrong with the thing?
I decided to remove the lid and have a look.
Empty.
Not a drop of water.
Well, not in the cistern, on the floor however,
there was a lot.
Problem was, I needed to flush.
As I emptied bucket after bucket of water
into the toilet I had a flashback from my childhood.
Growing up I spent most of my summer holidays
with my family at our holiday cottage situated an hour or
so outside of Stockholm.
As a kid, it was a magical and wonderous place with
adventures to be had and foreign territories to explore.
It had cherry trees, apple trees, gooseberry bushes,
wild growing raspberries, oodles of rhubarb and ''wild''
strawberries.
All through our three months off from school, us kids
would snack from the ample supply of delicious food growing
in our garden. It was quite a large property with one main
house at one end and a garage which had a workshop and two
''loft'' bedrooms at the other end.
It was a heritage listed property so it was old, but it
did have electricity, indoor toilets, and a proper bathroom.
About the toilets,.....they never really worked properly.
They were always getting blocked and my dad would spend
hours!!! trying to unblock them. When the toilets were out of
action (the mechanical flushing didn't work), flushing had to
be done the old way, one bucket at the time.
Come Monday morning I called a plumber.
As luck would have it the plumber was able to come
over straight away.
He fixed it in a jiffy and said he would send me an email
that I could pay on the internet.
Thing is, I don't do any money transactions on the net.
(I was hacked once and lost all my money and have not
done any transactions since then.)
''What if we just use this invoice book and I'll write
you an invoice?'' I asked.
''I haven't done one in years, but I guess that will work'' he
answered with a quizzical look on his face.
After he left I started to think about how many things
we do these days that rather than investing our trust in
something tangible, it relies on us investing our trust
on something intangible.
(We used to use tangible mechanical clocks, paper address books,
paper files for documents, paper phone books, mechanical type-
writers with ribbons and keys, phones with mechanical dials
and bells, paper mail, etc. etc. etc.)
For all its convenience, speed and efficiency, are we investing
too much trust in all things digital/technological?
Have we gone from trusting in an invisible ''God/Energy/Being/Creator/
Spirit etc.'' to trusting in an ever changing, ever developing,
ever expanding, yet also ''invisible'' technology?
How do we decide when something is ''real''?
When it(whatever the ''it'' is) is made up of elementary
particles?
When we can touch it, see it, smell it, hear it?
Are numbers real for instance? I mean, they do not
have a tangible existence in the world.
Binary, which is the fundamental building block of virtually
all digital logic, is it real?
When I was 16 years old I watched a movie called:
2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick.
The movie was released in 1968 and the year 2001
seemed very, very far away. That HAL, a computer
with a human personality would go crazy and kill
humans seemed very farfetched and way beyond the scope
of probabilities.
I still remember walking away from the movie theater
feeling very uneasy and wondering if the movie in some
way or another perhaps wasn't somehow a bit
prophetic.......
I can't help but wonder how it is that when it comes
to technology we are ''giants/innovators/creators/trailblazers'',
but when it comes to understanding ourselves and others,
to treat each other with dignity and compassion,
to respect our environment and all that lives and breathes within
and on it, we still behave as if we somehow continuously fail
to learn from our mistakes.
In my view, when we talk about the future we need to
remember to give as much attention, consideration and
intelligence toward the understanding of what it is to be a human
being as we do to what it takes to create an artificial being.
After all, we talk about minds, about thoughts, about emotions,
but who among us can say exactly what those ''really'' are.........
about the image: acrylic on canvas title: ''I used to be touched and heard"
The original is a sculpture my son made from a
typewriter he smashed and then put on a stand
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